Fabienne Lasserre

Because of the way the work sits within its site when shown, it picks up on the interactions and rhythms between things, oscillating with its surroundings. The shapes, with their open forms, holes, and spaces in between, can ‘crop or frame the space around them. Inviting or obstructing passage and sight, the pieces include “what they are not”: the area around them, the people looking at them, the other pieces in the room.’ (Lasserre, F. 2019).

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Lasserre sees this as ‘embodying connections between entities usually seen as separate, where bodies, materials and things are porous’ (Lasserre, F. 2019). Lasserre says, ‘the sculptures are facts that the senses explain’ (Hyperallergic, 2013). I think this porous quality could be considered a hinterland, meaning “An area lying beyond what is visible or known,” which I also grapple with. She describes it as an ‘excluded middle, the part that is left out when things are divided into categories’ (Lasserre, F. 2019). As I explore internal spaces in my practice, I am confronted with the fact that internal spaces have more potential than external spaces, but you can’t have one without knowledge of the other. I think this relativity is up for more debate in my research to come. 

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I feel there are many similarities between mine and Lasserre’s works, a concern for instability and fragility, a lyrical and poetic disposition, and a requirement over how the works are navigated by their viewer. As well as being ‘defined by protuberances [and] various bodily tensions: leaning, carrying reaching…[they] make suggestive reference to…appendages that act at once as leg, arm, and body.’ (Artlog, 2011)

What I can learn from Lasserre is how to work with softer materials. In an interview between Fabienne Lasserre and artist Alex Ebstein, Lasserre talks of using materials which are ‘forgiving…that allow for change and transformation’ (The Remix, 2018).  This haptic looseness and fluidity are missing in my making, and I hope to riff off the possibilities of this. Lasserre also shows me that materials don’t have to be big, heavy, or expensive or rely on resources like welding or casting to make something of scale and visual weight. Because of their adaptability in the making, the works are also adaptive in their architectonic response, which is a transformation I would invite my works to do too. 

To critically reflect on the differences between our practices would be to point out Lasserre’s use of colour. Colour in Lasserre’s works feels like it comes from painterly decisions; they are also bolder, blockier, and grungier, which isn’t a methodology or a colour palette I share.